Good-bye Foreign Visitors
News June 30th, 2008
Cup of Cha’s post Goodbye Foreign Visitors talks about how many expats feel about the new visa regulations.
Any foreigner living in China now will tell you that something weird is going on. Our fellow foreigners are disappearing in great numbers. It as if wild animals are picking them off on their smoggy bike rides to work. Increasingly we feel like Mexicans just inside the American border: looked upon suspicuously, regardless of the legitimacy of our legal status. Perhaps that overstating things, but a lot of people are moving away.
Visas are not being renewed for perpetual tourist and business folks. Some of these de-facto expulsions鈥漚re legitimate, like people who hang out in China, teaching in a semi-legal status. Others, like business people who are frequent visitors to China, are wrong-headed. The most peculiar trend, and a prominent one at that, is it appears anyone born 1984 or later gets an automatic rejection on new work visas.
Keep reading…
It’s really rough for teachers whose schools have promised to handle the visas. I’ve been on a round of goodbye dinners for friends who recently learned their jobs weren’t quite as legal or a stable as they’d been told. Vistors have also told me they’ve gotten only a 30-day tourist visa instead of the old 90-day one.
I don’t think these new regulations will keep the Olympics athletes out, but I fear that average people who want to see the Olympics and have a Beijing vacation, will be kept away.
Via Cup Of Cha
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You’re just not listening are you? Don’t you understand? The Olympic Games must be kept safe and secure, so you can’t have all these foreigners running loose around the place - they may be spies, saboteurs or terrorists. And they want to show off China at its best, with Chinese people on the streets not foreigners.
By making this the best and most secure Olympics event ever, millions of foreign tourists will be attracted and will come to enjoy the experience.**
** and be fleeced